In my recent projects and with my students in Advanced Multimedia, I have been experimenting with the excellent skrollr plugin for creating HTML5 web apps, or self-contained but networked “books” for multiple devices. I like the way vertical scroll animations facilitate a kind of cinematic reading. The duration of a “dissolve”, for example, can be left to the reader’s navigation speed, as…

After being gently knocked over by “Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking”, I ordered “ambience is a novel with a logo.”. I recommend you scroll through my little video reading to get acquainted with Tan Lin. click to play Lin remixes networked and print reading/writing practices into something dense, beautiful, puzzling…

Many of us know what to do with a web page filled with different media. There is no longer a “web of attractions” where text next to image next to video carries an inherent fascination. What is left of the web’s mystery is just a weary awe at an expanding network of data. So much…

Digital filmmaker Alejandro Adams, of the original and newer braintrustdv.com, has organized and posted a self-distribution roundtable. Here is my entry: What if cinema art’s economic model shifted from its traditional show business roots to something resembling the art market and in the process helped reconstruct the economics of art–making in the digital age. That’s…

My apologies to Belinda for not linking to this interview earlier. It is an interview with me about my video work – an exercise and an unexpected pleasure to articulate what I’m trying to do, my inspirations etc. Check out the other interviews on her site. Inspiring work.

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. -Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation. The 3-minute pop song has it’s roots in the…

The artwork as a field of potential meaning. Frustrating for some, exhilarating for others. An interview with Diane Williams in elimae. elimae: …. Is it your aim, as much as you may be able to describe your aim, to allow the language of your fictions to achieve some semblance beyond which you intended, to become,…

Six months away from the vlog. There is a lot going on behind the scenes – personal/professional/national/global – but really I have been thinking, reading and absorbing. Where to go with one’s extra energy? Being a contemporary “media worker” is all about stops, starts and about-faces. Mark Deuze’s Media Work lays out the opportunities and…

Derik A. Badman’s great blog about comics, multipaneled storytelling and generative literaure…etc. He is here quoting Alison Bechdel on “incidental life.” “The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it on the toilet, it just weaves itself into your everyday life. It’s about little details. It’s not about grand…

A recent podcast interview with Adrian, gets me thinking about what he calls “minor video” or “minor cinema.” The value of the miniature in a networked world. The battle for attention, screen space, hits, ratings as modeled on youtube will, Adrian predicts, subside within six years. We are experiencing the growing pains of a new…

Looking at contemporary online examples of haibun and haiga- forms that still inspire me as approaches to videoblogging and net cinema – I end up on this great exchange about our storytelling future: The 21st-century novel. – By Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart – Slate Magazine Can written narratives represent this world? Can they convey…

In bed with a bad back and consuming the archives of Mark Amerika aka Professor VJ. He is making cinema and modeling a spontaneous, intuitive way of working through his blog. Mysterious, body-centered, "not-me" explorations with actors, landscapes, camera and editing tools – nutritious fodder for ambitious art vloggers. And not to mention an important…

A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination by Angus Fletcher I devoured this book. It resonated with thoughts of an emergent poetics of online cinema. Angus Flectcher argues that Amercian poetry, starting with Whitman, exploded the notion that poetry should gather images to form an expression of the…